Good morning, everyone. I just want to look around. Can you hear me? Is this working? Okay. I just want to look around for a minute and see who's here. I just ... Hello? How's that? Better? Can you hear? Okay. Anyhow, I was going to say I just want to look around and see who's here. Some of you I know. Some of you I don't know yet. Like here? Like this? Is that good? Can you hear me? Do I have to keep my chin tucked in? Okay. Good. Okay. Is that okay? Okay. So anyhow, don't try this at home. These people are professionals. And

[01:07]

this should only be done in the presence of a responsible adult. So anyhow, let me finish looking around at you. Great. You got a haircut. Looks good. So did Wendy. So anyhow, is that working now? Okay. So anyhow, what I'd like to see, if you don't mind, is kind of a show of hands of people who are either here for maybe the first time or maybe just the first couple of times. Can I see a hand? Okay. Ooh. Hi. Great. Great. Thank you. Okay. So that's great. I'm so glad that there's so many of you who are kind of new because what I want to talk about is kind of for new people. The rest of you can go to sleep. And I've got these books here and there, kind of not right where I want them. Actually, maybe they'll just

[02:18]

sit right down here for a while. You know, in the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they all have sort of a nugget teaching that's contained in the kind of things they say. In the Christian tradition, which I was raised, we started out with, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord. Like that. In Islam, of course, you have the confession of faith that goes, there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. And in Judaism, the great granddaddy of them all, we've got hero Israel, the Lord is one, the Lord is God. So the thing that these statements have in common, one of the things that they have in common, is they're each one of them a statement of faith, a statement of belief in a spiritual being and

[03:22]

that being's relationship to the world and to the beings in the world. We don't really have anything quite like that in Buddhism. We don't have a statement of belief that sums up who we are as a religious community or as a community of like-minded folk. What we do have, however, are what we call the three refuges. And the three refuges are, I take refuge in Buddha, I take refuge in Dharma, I take refuge in Sangha. So Buddha, Buddha is the teacher, however Buddha chooses to manifest herself today or tomorrow or yesterday. Historically, 2,500 years ago, Buddha was some guy wandering around India and talking to people. Today,

[04:24]

she's Deirdre or Elizabeth back there, who I just met the other day. Hi. So that's Buddha. And the Dharma, Dharma is a really complicated word, but for our purposes we can just say that it means the teaching, the teaching of the Buddha, the things that the Buddha said and that we try to carry out as best we can, or we use as kind of a roadmap for our lives. I like that better, so kind of a roadmap. So that's the teaching, that's the Dharma. The Sangha is what I want to talk about today, taking refuge in Sangha. And it's particularly appropriate because just before this lecture we had one of our truly wonderful residence meetings, and that's where the residential Sangha comes together and talks about things pertinent to us all. Sometimes they're

[05:26]

easier than other times. But anyhow, so I want to talk about the refuge of Sangha. And the Sangha is many things. To begin with, I can say it's the community of people who practice the Dharma or who try to practice the Dharma, the community of people who are a community of like-minded people who have pledged themselves to practice together and to live their lives together. So I found myself wondering, what is refuge? What do we mean when we say refuge? So I went to the dictionary, and the dictionary says that refuge is shelter or protection from danger or distress, a means of resort in difficulty. And a refugee is one that flees for safety. So sometimes I like to think that maybe we should be calling ourselves refugees instead of Buddhists, you know, because that's what we're doing, we're fleeing for safety. So this means of resort in difficulty, I mean, we all have

[06:30]

difficulty in our lives, whether it's about money or relationships or health or psychological issues, we all have difficulty in our life. That's kind of the bottom line. As a matter of fact, it's so much the bottom line, it's the first noble truth of Buddhism, that there's going to be trouble. There is trouble. You can't get away from it. So where do we go? Where do we go for resort in difficulty? Where do we take refuge? Well, in our least inspired moments, we often take refuge in food, drugs, booze, sex, money, TV, or other forms of distraction. These are distractions, but they're also refuges because it's where we have, for one reason or another, figured out we can go to feel better. In our somewhat more wholesome times, we go to our

[07:36]

friends for refuge, our family, to nature, to art, to things like that, to things that make us feel better, all of which fade and die, all of which go away, all of which eventually disappoint us. And I don't mean that in a negative kind of way, but there is no person in my life, even the people I love the most, who will not at some point in my life disappoint me, will not be there for me in exactly the way that I need him or her to be there for me. So as a refuge, it's pretty good, but it doesn't last all the time. So those of us who speak of ourselves as Buddhist refugees, where do we go? We go to the three treasures. The three treasures are the three refuges, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. So anyhow, I could speak at length on each of them, but today I'm just going to talk about Sangha. And you know, it's been very much on my mind lately, this whole refuge

[08:40]

and Sangha, because I've recently, within the past month, been offered and taken on the responsibility of being the director of City Center. And so that's for me about accepting responsibility to take care of the boundaries and the parameters of this place. It's not a spiritual job, I suppose, except in as much as everything we do here reflects our practice. It's an administrative one, but it places me with a lot of responsibility for the Sangha. And I'm still trying to figure out what that responsibility is, how much I should keep and how much I should let go. And in January, this coming January, I'm going to be ordained as a priest in this Sangha. And so

[09:41]

that's a very special relationship. And it's one that requires, on my part, a great deal of faith, because I haven't the slightest idea of what that means. I get to even wear funnier clothes than these, and these are bad enough, and shave my head, and we'll see how that goes. Fortunately, I rejoice in a well-shaped skull. Not everybody can say that. I've seen some real bad ... and anyhow, so ... nobody presently in the room. Never mind. Anyhow, so what is Sangha? So the word itself, I looked it up, I looked these things up. The word itself, from the original, it just means something like a gathering or a community. And it was actually used before the time of the historical Buddha to describe the gatherings of assemblies to make the law in the small Indian city-states

[10:45]

of his time and before then. So in a way, it's also kind of like a town meeting. That's one of the original meanings of the word Sangha. And historically, in Buddhism at least, the Sangha can be seen as the four assemblies, the monks, the nuns, the laywomen, and the laymen, who took refuge in the first two refuges, Buddha and Dharma. And so historically, that's what Buddhism talks about, those four divisions of the large community of the faithful, if you will. And I have been told, and I don't know if this is true or not, but it makes a nice story, that the Buddhist Sangha, the Buddhist monastic tradition, is currently the longest-lasting community of human beings that exists in the world, as an unbroken lineage from, as we sometimes say in

[11:50]

from warm hand to warm hand. So for almost 25 years, there has been a Sangha, and it's a pretty good track record. So this Sangha, this community of people who take refuge in Buddha and Dharma, reaches, as you know, over many, many countries and many cultures, from people practicing a simple sort of folk faith, which is involved with the accumulation of merit and closely allied to ancestor worship, and other things that we think of as very devotional, and perhaps even, you know, if we're getting on our Western high horse, superstitious practices, to our own somewhat austere and philosophically sophisticated practice of Zen. So it's a wide, wide net, the Sangha. It's Indra's net, and we're going to come back to Indra's net a little bit further down the page. So

[12:55]

the Sangha is a wide net, and it's a wide refuge for beings in distress, which we all are, most of the time. It's also, the Sangha is, to some extent a social and even to some extent a political entity, and I'd like to read a couple of short quotes that I took from the Encyclopedia of Religion on the subject of Sangha. Let's see. The first quote goes, this realization of no abiding self, which, my own parentheses, is a fundamental teaching of Buddhism, this realization of no abiding self must ultimately be a personal one, but it is facilitated by social organization. So in some sense, the Sangha, then, is that social organization which makes it possible and encourages us each to see deeply into the

[14:03]

self and to give up those mistaken notions of self, which are the root of our suffering, as the Buddha taught. The second quotation from the same article, Encyclopedia of Religion, you can find it right downstairs in the library, goes like this, religious quest within a well-organized social group, the Sangha, was a specifically Buddhist innovation. Although the ideals of the Sangha were spiritual, its non-egoistic, socialistic, and republican features made it a model for a secular society at peace with itself. I like that a lot. I'm going to read it again. Religious quest within a well-organized social group, that's us, right? All of you who were at the residence meeting know that this morning, was a specifically Buddhist innovation. Although the ideals of the Sangha were spiritual, its non-egoistic, socialistic, and republican features made it a model for a secular society at peace

[15:05]

with itself. Sounds pretty good. But it is a model which, like most good models, is more praised than practiced. And you know, even in some sense despised. And at odds with the values of the prevailing world, which values competition before cooperation, and holds to this illusory idea of separate self before the vast freedom of selflessness. I want to read a little quote from a poem that reminds me of this, and actually what I'd really like to do is just sit here and read this whole long wonderful poem, but that's not my job today. The poem is from William Carlos Williams, the American poet, and it's a very long poem called Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. Some of you lucky ones may know it, and those of you who don't can look it up. It's well worth your time. My heart

[16:11]

rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there, but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Hear me out, for I too am concerned, and every man who wants to die at peace in his bed besides. I really love this poem. So Williams talks of despised poems, and in some sense we can see the Sangha as a despised formation of human association, even though it has worked pretty well for 2,500 years. The association of people who are willing to let go, who are willing to help create a safe space for

[17:17]

each other to do that letting go, who are willing to turn over to some extent their wills and their lives to something that they can't really see the boundaries of. And this isn't popular. This is not a popular notion in the world, never has been. As a matter of fact, you know, sometimes we say, the Buddha himself said that I have come to go against the views of the world, and sometimes we say that Buddhism turns the worldly views upside down. So might it be. The Sangha is also a mythological concept. In the mornings, at morning service, we recite the names of the ancestors, our ancestors who bring us to this point, our teachers, who pass the Dharma, the teaching, from warm hand to warm hand. And we start off with not the historical Buddha, who we pretty much figure probably really

[18:19]

was a real guy, but the seven Buddhas before Buddha, who I personally have my doubts about. But our ancestors, so our ancestors are those who came before us, and pretty much some of them may be historical, but a lot of them, you know, and the stories about them, but they're stories we tell ourselves, right? So they are our Sangha, they are our ancestors in the Sangha, they are our mothers and fathers and great ancestors going all the way back before we can even think about how far back they went. And we tell ourselves stories about them in the same way that we tell, because we're telling stories about ourselves in the same way and at the same time, right? And we tell ourselves these stories to give ourselves a sense of our world and our place in it. And so how

[19:20]

we are connected to them tells us how we are connected to all things and how we grow from a field of endeavor and enlightenment that is actually vaster than we know. So when we make up these little stories, it's just kind of like a way of trying to explain to ourselves and showing us where we fit into things which are inconceivable. So as I said, we're telling ourselves stories about them and we're telling our stories about ourselves as well. So here's a couple of stories about us here today. What's going on here, right? You know, right now, right here. You know, in one sense, what we have is a vast, vast Buddha field, you know, full of enlightened Bodhisattva, Mahasattvas, enlightenment beings, each one of you perfect and transcendent and manifesting in

[20:24]

the world for the good of all beings. You know, a Bodhisattva is someone who puts off her own enlightenment and her own complete liberation to work for the good of others. So vast Buddha field, right? And another story is we're kind of a box of greedy, quarrelsome monkeys, you know, who sort of chatter at each other and who are just a little bit too smart for our own good, as we have often seen. Or are we just a collection of men and women met together, doing the best that we can with our good intentions and what we've been given to work with? So those are three short stories and which of them is true? Which do we say yes to? Yes, Bodhisattva. Yes, greedy monkey. Yes, man and woman doing the best you can with what you've been given. They're all true. And sometimes, you know, we live in one and sometimes we live in the

[21:32]

other. And it's not, you know, when we're living as the great Bodhisattva, Mahasattvas, it's not a good idea to get too far away from our greedy little monkey self because, you know, he's there too. So anyhow, if the Sangha is a mythological construction, a people which tells stories to itself, then it follows that the Sangha is also a community which refines a common language. Okay, you got that? It's a community which refines a common language. To some extent, that is our work together to refine the language that we use to speak to each other, to speak about each other, to speak about the world, to speak about the way we experience the world. So we do this by talking to each other over and over and over and over again. And sometimes we say the same thing over and over and over again. And each time, maybe we try to say it in a little different way so that

[22:36]

maybe you'll understand me this time, or maybe I can ask you one more time to please tell me what it is you mean, or maybe we can talk again about the most important thing, whatever that is, you know. But over and over again, we're telling ourselves these stories over and again, our stories of our ancestors, the stories of our own lives, the story of who we are, who we think we are, who we want to be, over and over again. And each time we try to refine the telling of the story, you know, and that our challenge, our challenge as we tell each other the stories of our lives is not to become caught in cliche and not to stop listening and not to stop trying, but to keep trying to develop and refine the language that we use. And this creation of a common tongue, a common language, is not something that is done in a day or a week or a year. It takes a very long time, and it takes,

[23:42]

you know, a commitment to stay together while we refine the language for a long time, for no matter how long it takes. You know, in the Blue Cliff Record, which is a 9th century Zen classic collection of stories about our ancestors and ourselves, there occurs the phrase that I like very much. It's actually a question, and it is, where are the patch-robed monks who will live together and die together? You know, where are the patch-robed monks who will live together and die together? And that is Sangha too. And, you know, you don't have to be a patch-robed monk to be part of it. And Buddhism itself is a language, among other things. It's a way of describing the world to ourselves and to each other. And because the story of our life, the story of our lives, the story of our lives together is a story worth telling, it's a story worth taking the time and

[24:48]

effort and care to make sure it's a good story, carefully and lovingly told, a story that will serve us well throughout our life, however long or short that might be. So that's a story, and that's Sangha too. It's a collection of storytellers and listeners to stories and readers of stories and enacting of stories. You know, maybe some of you went to Zazen instruction today, and maybe some of you already sit Zazen or some other form of meditation. Well, you know, when I sit here like this in my Zazen posture with my chin tucked in and my back erect, you know, that's an enactment of the Buddha story. You know, this is how we tell ourselves that Buddha sat, and this is how I embody that story, and how each of you embodies that story as you sit, in whatever posture Buddha takes when you sit. So I guess that makes us a community of actors

[25:55]

as well, okay? Actors and mimes, because we don't talk in the Zendo. And anyhow, we don't wear a face most of the time. So I like this one too. Did I do it? Oh dear, I think I lost something here. Just a second. There was a, oh no, okay, here it is. Sorry, I thought I was on a different page. So the Sangha, among the other things the Sangha is, is the Sangha is an erotic community. And I mean that in both the wider and the more limited senses of the word erotic and eros. You know, here people do what people do. You know, they fall in love and out of love. You know, they give each other pleasure or not. They have sex, you know, or give each other two-minute, you know, shoulder rubs when they need it. They get married or not, have children or not, do all the things that we do together as human beings. Because how could it be otherwise? You know, we are human

[26:56]

beings, you know, and we are circumscribed, you know, by the splendor and the misery of our bodies, you know. So I looked up eros because I've been looking up things in the dictionary about this, about this, for this lecture. And there are two, there are two definitions that I really like. They're actually the first two. Well, no, the second two, the first one was the God. Eros, the aggregate of pleasure-directed life instincts whose energy is derived from libido. The aggregate of pleasure-directed life instincts whose energy is derived from libido. And I really like this one, love directed towards self-realization. Those are the dictionary definitions of eros. So I don't think I'm going too far to describe the Sangha as an erotic community as well. Because we are bodies moving through space together, charged with the energy, the erotic energy of other bodies,

[27:58]

you know. And how could we, how could we love each other if that were not so? And so as you see your friend coming down the hallway, you may think or feel something like these words from my favorite poem, if I can find them. Ah, yes, here it is. There is something, something urgent I have to say to you and you alone, but it must wait while I drink in the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time. There's something, something urgent I have to say to you and you alone, but it must wait while I drink in the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time. You know, and it may be the last time. Each time you see your friend, it may be the last time. We don't know. And that's

[29:04]

what adds to the sweetness and the urgency of our life together, this not knowing, this knowing that we are temporary manifestations, each and every one of us, and that each and every one of us is bound to disappear. So that is a story about our life together, too, and that is another definition of Sangha. And our love for each other is then directed towards self-realization, which is ultimately freedom from self. Remember that it also said, that definition, it said love directed towards self-realization? Yeah, okay. So this self-realization, this love directed towards self-realization, ultimately leads to the freedom from self. Dogen Zenji, who is celebrating his 800th birthday this year, happy birthday Dogen Zenji, was the monk who brought this particular strain of Buddhism, Soto Zen, from China to Japan. He was a Japanese monk who went to China

[30:09]

and brought it back, and is our direct ancestor in the story that we tell ourselves about that. But he says, to study Buddhism is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be enlightened by all beings. Okay, so that's also love that tends towards self-realization, towards the liberation from self. So one of the challenges that we have living in Sangha, as Sangha, whether we live together or just come together as fellow practitioners, is to put aside, as best we can, the resistance and the rebellion and the shame that we are all plagued with that keeps us from meeting the one who comes down the hallway, to meet the self reflecting the self in all the splendor and misery of bodies. This is the erotic life of the Sangha.

[31:13]

Sometimes we say, and I can't remember where this particular quote comes from, but we say, it takes a Buddha and a Buddha to make a Buddha. And recently we've had some births. It takes a Buddha and a Buddha to make a Buddha. And I like to think about that because recently in the community we've had some children born over the last six months, and one of them lives just up the street in the same building that I do, and I get to hang out with him a lot, so he's a little Buddha. But it also means that we don't realize our Buddha nature by ourselves. We don't realize our Buddha nature alone. It takes me and you to make a Buddha. It takes a Buddha and a Buddha to make a Buddha. And, you know, I'm serious when I say that there is shame, there is rebellion, and there is resistance in all of us that keeps us from meeting each other as we wish, that keeps us from creating that Buddha who is, it keeps us from creating the Buddha who is always there.

[32:21]

So we got to work on that. I got to work on that. And finally I'd like to pursue the idea of the self reflecting the self in the image of Indra's net. I used that a little bit earlier when I said that Sangha is a wide net for refugees. Actually I kind of like that, kind of like under the great trapeze of life. Okay, there's a net. You don't have to do this without a net. So I'm going to quote from a book called Huayen Buddhism, The Jewel Net of Indra by Francis Cook. Huayen Buddhism is just briefly a school of Chinese Buddhism which takes its lead from the Huayen scripture, the flower adornment scripture, the Avatamsaka Sutra. For our discussion today you don't really need to know much more about that, except it's real psychedelic. The scripture. Okay, now I've lost my place. Okay, so here Francis Cook, who is the author of this

[33:27]

book, says, we may begin with an image which has always been the favorite Huayen method of exemplifying the manner in which things exist. I forgot about this. Thank you. Okay, here it is. Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung together by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each eye of the net. You know where each of the ropes come together? Okay. And since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will

[34:30]

discover that in its polished surface, there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. You got that? So in each of the jewels, all the other ones are reflected, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflecting in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels. So it's like an infinity of reflections, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring. The Huayen school has been fond of this image, mentioned many times in its literature, because it symbolizes the cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual identity and mutual intercausality. Let me read that last sentence again. It symbolizes, Indra's net does, a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual identity

[35:35]

and mutual intercausality. So this is the Sangha in an ontological sense, interbeing with all the other beings and the interplay of dependence and interdependence, how each thing arises, how we are all reflected in each other, and how we discover our true identity in each other, because that's the best mirror we have. Let's see, that's pretty much what I wanted to say today, but the other thing I wanted to say, which is coming down from that lofty plateau of Indra's net, is that one of the other things that the Sangha is, it's kind of like a marriage. We make

[36:35]

our commitments to each other, and we make them in the words of the old vows, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, when we get along with each other, when we don't get along with each other, when that person coming down the hallway at 5 o'clock in the morning is carrying a very large and noisy bell, and we would much prefer to turn over and go to sleep, or when somebody for the millionth time does not pick up the coffee cup that they left in the small kitchen, and why do I always ... you get the point. Anybody who has lived here or even visited here kind of gets it, or who is married or has ever lived with roommates, or has lived in a family. So that's what it is, but we stick it out with each other. We do our best, and sometimes we need to go away for a while, and sometimes we come back, and sometimes we find or look for other ways to realize our life, because the world offers us many opportunities, and for some of us,

[37:43]

this particular refuge is the right place for the particular refugees that we are. So it's great to see you all, especially great to see so many new people. If I have said anything that has been useful at all or interesting, please keep it as your own. If I've said anything that has either annoyed you or misled you, please forget it as quickly as possible, and forgive me, and maybe we'll see some of you back here again. So thanks a lot. May our intention ...

[38:28]

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